tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jun 30 18:25:39 2001

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RE: Quplah



[email protected] said:

	jIghoj tlhingan Hol. choQaH? 

Welcome to the list, Brian! I'm taD, the current Beginner's Grammarian. It's
my job to help beginners here with Klingon. You can add the letters "KLBC"
to your subject line whenever you want me to check your work, or if you have
a question about how to say something in Klingon. If possible, you should
also include what you were trying to say, in English. This will make it
easier for me to make sure that you say what you are trying to say.

You made a good attempt for your first message. For the first sentence, it
looks like you're trying to say "I learn the Klingon language."
The normal word order in English is <subject - verb - object>. Since the
subject of the sentence is "I" and the object is "Klingon language", in
English we say "I learn the Klingon language". However, Klingon word order
is the reverse: <object - verb - subject>. So {tlhIngan Hol} goes first, to
the left of the verb.
So correcting the word order, this would be *{tlhIngan Hol jIghoj}. However,
the verb prefix here, {jI-}, indicates that "I" is the subject, and that
there is *no object*. What we really want is the prefix that indicates that
"I" is the subject, and "it" is the object. If you check the table on page
33 of The Klingon Dictionary, you'll find that {vI-} is the prefix for "I -
it".
So you would want to say:
{tlhIngan Hol vIghoj} "I learn the Klingon language."

For the second sentence, you're asking a yes/no question. So you should add
the verb suffix {-'a'} to the end of the verb. When {-'a'} is added to the
end of a verb, it means that you are asking a yes/no question. For example:
{choQaH} "You help me."
{choQaH'a'?} "Are you going to help me?"

Again, you can send messages to the list here to practice Klingon or if you
have any questions about the language.If you include "KLBC" in the subject
line, the Beginner's Grammarian will be the one to answer them. A list of
Frequently Asked Questions can be found at:
http://www.bigfoot.com/~dspeers/klingon/faq.htm
Also, another good resource for learning Klingon is the free postal course
that the Klingon Language Institute provides. You can find more information
about it at:
/study/postcourse.html

Qapla'!

- taD



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